


A White Wolf Running

by cruellae (tinkabelladk)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Everyone is on the run, M/M, The White Wolf, kind of AU let's forget the canon, this is definitely a romantic story
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 15:03:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17286287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinkabelladk/pseuds/cruellae
Summary: After the events of Captain America: Civil War, Steve and his faction are on the run. Currently, he's hiding out in Moscow with Natasha acting as his guide. He doesn't like it much there.The Winter Soldier woke up in Wakanda, where even the best technology in the world couldn't remove the stain of Hydra from his soul. Convinced they can't help him anymore, he seeks out the one person who will never turn him away.(I am not great at following canon so please forgive me if this wanders.)





	A White Wolf Running

_Steve Rogers is falling. In the moments before he hits the deep blue of the Potomac River, breaking the surface in a spray of white water, he looks nothing like Captain America. His body, limp and unconscious, moves ungraciously in its downward trajectory. He looks just like a skinny boy who, a long, long time ago, tried to fight off bullies twice his size, racked with shivers and a cough too big for his frail frame._

_The Winter Soldier watches him fall. And in the next moment, only a heartbeat further in time, the Soldier is falling too. Steve Rogers is a leaf, fluttering downward. The Soldier is a bullet. The Soldier never misses his mark._

**A White Wolf Running**

Steve hates Moscow. He hates the cold, the food, and that suspicious stare every single Russian citizen wears. He hates the language, with its strange, angular alphabet and the alien sounds that just won’t stick in his brain, no matter how much he practices with Natasha.

He thinks he has never been so lonely in his life. People are eager to make friends with the big American, but when they find he’s not going to spread around the American wealth they are sure he must possess, most quickly lose interest. He doesn’t know what Nat does with her days anymore—he doesn’t ask and she doesn’t offer a word. They’re starting to get on each other’s nerves after so much time on the run, hiding out in France and then Morocco and now Moscow. Somehow, it’s come to this—just the two of them. The faction that Steve in his folly thought to lead away from the Avengers has splintered and splintered again, until there’s almost nothing left.

Some days he thinks of calling Tony, but the truth is he’ll never be that desperate.

Today, like every day, he trains with the rudimentary equipment he has in the dismal two bedroom apartment he shares with Nat. He has learned to adapt, to use his own body weight as resistance, do curls with buckets of water, and have Nat sit on his back when he does pushups. Whatever he can do to stay in shape and keep from going mad.

After he works out, he showers, dresses in several layers, and steps out into the Moscow winter. He stops in a kebab place for lunch, and the woman turning the skewers over a cinderblock oven waves at him. Her hair is short and stringy, greasy from the time she spends bent over the hot stove, but her face is one of the few that feels genuinely kind. She gives him an extra kebab with a knowing smile. “For your girl,” she says.

He insists on paying for it, and eats it himself on the way back to the apartment, so he doesn’t have to explain that the woman he’s living with is not his girl, nor is she ever likely to be. He is starting to understand her a lot better, though, just from being in this godforsaken place.

When he gets back to the apartment, he’s surprised but not alarmed to find the door is unlocked. Nat isn’t usually home this early—and there are nights where she doesn’t come back at all. But it might be nice to see her, to pass a few hours with someone he can actually make conversation with.

He steps into the apartment, locking the door behind him. “Hey, Nat,” he says. “You’re back early.”

It’s only then that he actually looks at the person standing inside his apartment. And then he drops the two kebab skewers on the floor where they click softly on impact, and roll against his shoes.

 

#

 

The Winter Soldier breathes the quiet. The quiet is his home, his shelter. The quiet dark is where he waits, patient and ruthless as nightfall, for his mark to approach. The quiet means the absence of Hydra doctors with their needles and whining electrical machines, of orders and commands, of the static squeal of crossed wires in his mind.

Steve Rogers says nothing for a long while, and it gives the Soldier time to think. Then Steve tries for a smile, a pretense of ease and familiarity, when they are anything but familiar with each other.

“Hey, Bucky,” he says. “Long time, no see. I thought you were in Wakanda.”

The Soldier huffs a bitter laugh. “Turns out not even they can save me.” He would have been welcome to stay there, a charity case and a live bomb, to be pitied and watched, in case he should ever need to be put down. He doesn’t doubt someone from Wakanda is watching him still, to ensure he doesn’t pose a threat to the wider world. Those in Wakanda are not so indifferent to the suffering of their brethren as it might seem to outsiders. But even their technology—marvels that put Stark’s creations to shame—wasn’t enough to save Bucky Barnes’ soul.

“Maybe they just need more time,” Steve says, companionably enough.

The Soldier considers this. But he would know, wouldn’t he? If there was any salvation possible for him, he would know.

“Well, it’s good to see you,” Steve says. “Have you eaten?”

“I didn’t know where else to go,” the Soldier says. His voice comes out softer than he’d meant it, more a plea than an explanation.

“You’re always welcome to stay with me,” Steve says. His smile is meant for Bucky, that trickster, that bastard. But the flash of Steve’s teeth and the warmth in his eyes makes the Soldier feel warm as well, even though he is not Bucky Barnes anymore, and will never be again.

 

#

 

Steve makes the Soldier a sandwich on the hearty black bread the woman who lives above them bakes for him every week. “She feels like she owes me,” he explains with a soft laugh. “I caught her cat when he fell out the third story window.”

“You’re a hero,” the Soldier says.

“I’m not supposed to be a hero,” Steve says. “I’m supposed to be keeping a low profile. So don’t tell Nat.”

“I won’t,” the Soldier promises. He means it. He’s good at following a direct order.

Steve watches, his brow furrowed in concern he doesn’t voice, as the Soldier wolfs down the sandwich. It’s the best thing he’s had in weeks, and the first thing he’s had in two days. Steve makes another one without asking, and after the Soldier finishes that too, he leads the Soldier to one of the two bedrooms and insists he get some sleep. It’s only then that the Soldier allows himself to feel how tired he really is. It has been a long journey here—leaving Wakanda in the dead of night and crossing the globe. Of course T’Challa’s people let him go—he’s not so egotistical as to think he could really slip away unnoticed from such keen and capable watchers. But he thought it might make it a little easier on both sides if he disappeared in the middle of the night, rather than staying for protracted goodbyes.

Wakanda had been a place of contrasts for him—the stark beauty of the landscape and the despair he felt while witnessing it. The kindness of Shuri and her assistants and the agony of the process they put him through, removing Hydra’s trigger words from his mind. The deeper they delved, the more intractable Hydra’s grip on his soul seemed. Just as Steve Rogers could never be separated from Captain America, Bucky Barnes had become the Winter Soldier. And as the process dragged on, he became more and more certain that his broken mind would never be healed, and the bloodstain on his soul never removed.

When Shuri came to him and told him she was pretty sure the trigger phrases had been disabled, he had felt a distant relief, tempered by caution. She refused to test it, though he asked her to. It would be unethical, she said, because she didn’t know if his mind would ever recover from another assault. She was not willing to destroy him, if it came to that.

The next night he slipped away under the starlight. It took him months to track Steve Rogers—the Black Widow had been doing her job expertly. Eventually a few slip-ups made by other teammates—Scarlet Witch and Vision—gave away their location only to the most clever and dedicated observer.

Finally, the Soldier found Captain America again. Now, standing here in a cold apartment in the heart of Moscow, he isn’t sure why he came, except that he has nowhere else to go.


End file.
